


stupid

by syrupwit



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Needles, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Vague Resisty AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21672538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit
Summary: Dib doesn't get why Zim is mad.
Relationships: Dib/Zim (Invader Zim)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 167





	stupid

**Author's Note:**

> You know how sometimes you might post a thing simply because you can? This is one of those times.

By the time they get back to the ship, Zim is almost vibrating with rage. He keeps making these tiny grunts of anger, interspersed with dire mutterings under his breath. His antennae are twitching like mad. It’s kind of funny, even though it’s Dib’s fault. 

Dib knows he fucked up. He took a stupid risk and almost got himself killed in the process. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. Could have been the last time, though! Heh.

Wouldn’t it have been a better death, though, fighting an evil empire in the stars, than the one he always envisioned as a kid? At least it would’ve meant something this way. As much as Dib has tried to pursue otherwise, he never thought anything in his life would mean something. Man, the pain is making him loopy.

“Wipe that smile off your face, you idiot meatsack.” Zim kicks Dib’s ankle, and Dib stumbles, though the PAK apparatus that’s been supporting him immediately rights him. Zim’s claws dig into their grip around his waist, bright jabs of sensation through the haze in Dib’s head.

GIR is waiting in the entryway. He spreads his arms as they approach, ostensibly to accept the Dib-baton, but Zim hobbles right past him—“Aww!”—and heads for the medical cubby. 

“What’s your problem?” asks Dib. Zim ignores him, stripping off Dib’s jacket and shirt and strapping him into the Vzirphean nurse thing. Dib hates the Vzirphean nurse thing. It’s creepy, and it squeezes his arm too hard when it’s taking his vitals. He almost prefers the Irken devices. They involve a lot more pointy bits, but they don’t try to… _stroke_ him. Ugh.

The wound on Dib’s forearm is bubbling at the edges, starting to numb. He had tripped a booby trap loaded with a slow-acting poison, apparently the only remaining legacy of a long-conquered planet called Kloom. It’s supposed to dissolve his brain from the inside out, if he understood Zim’s frenzied explanation correctly. His mind is already clouding.

Even with Dib’s fuckup, they got the thing they were looking for. The mission was a success. Lard Nar will be pleased. Why is Zim so mad?

Zim fusses with the first aid kit, applying self-disinfecting bandages to Dib’s cuts and scrapes. Speaking of pointy bits, there’s one now. Dib turns his head away before it goes into his vein. Vzirphean needle-analogues are so weird. They’re more like tiny lampreys. Sucker mouths. 

“…lucky.” Zim is talking to him. “If we had been even a little further from the ship—”

Wait, why is Zim kneeling?

Dib peers at him fuzzily. “What are you doing?”

“Shut up and hold still.” Zim struggles with Dib’s boots. “I don’t know why you wear these horrible things. They’re completely impractical.”

“They’re cool,” Dib defends. He likes his boots. He spent a really long time adding spikes to the backs.

“They’re clown shoes. You SWIM in them. Someday you’ll trip and fall in these, and your big fat head will swell to the size of a bleep.” Zim yanks at the bootlaces, frustrated. “Then Zim will point at your bleep-sized head, and laugh and laugh and LAUGH.”

“Blimp. You mean blimp.” The Vzirphean nurse thing seizes Dib’s arm, and he closes his eyes. His head, big and fat or not, is throbbing.

“I mean what I said.” There is the _snick_ of a blade; Dib feels the laces break. It’s his second-to-last pair of laces, and he has no idea where to get more, but he’s too out of it to protest or start up the old argument about Zim learning basic knotmanship. For a super-advanced alien race, Irkens are surprisingly unsophisticated in some domains.

Zim frees Dib from his boots, peels off his socks, and fits soft slippers onto his feet. His familiar litany of disgusted noises is a distraction from the pressure around Dib’s arm and the rubbery, oddly moist tentacles feeling up his various parts of his body. Then Dib feels Zim’s weird little hand on the button of his pants.

“Zim?” 

“Lift his hips,” Zim tells the nurse thing. Dib’s seat obliges, tilting his pelvis upward.

“Uh,” says Dib, as Zim unzips his pants and begins to wrestle them down his legs. He's not sure of much right now, but that's not normal.

“I hate these,” Zim tells Dib’s knee, tugging the pants down to Dib’s calves. “I’m going to throw them out the airlock.”

Stripped down to underwear, Dib tries not to shiver, or to dwell on the scrape of Zim’s claws against his bare skin. “But these are my only pants…” 

“You should wear the clothes Zim made for you.” Zim kicks the pants away. He starts scanning Dib’s legs with a device.

“I like _my_ clothes, okay?” Dib closes his eyes again. The tentacles have retracted for the moment, and the lamprey-needles have injected him with something. He feels his facial muscles start to relax. Okay, it’s a sedative. He’s got about ten minutes of consciousness left, then. Space drugs are wild.

Zim hops into Dib’s lap. Seated on Dib’s upper thigh, he comes to about chest height, not counting the antennae. He scans Dib’s abdomen and stands to examine his chest, neck, head. His movements are quick, precise. Impersonal. Since they technically joined the same side, Zim only touches Dib professionally now.

(Not that he used to touch Dib… unprofessionally? But there was a lot of roughhousing, back on Earth. Dib was a weird kid. Why is he thinking about this?)

“Next time, I’m going to lock you in the ship,” Zim informs Dib’s forehead. 

“You know I’ll just break out.”

“Maybe I’ll chain you up and put you in the cargo hold.”

“Very kinky, Zim.” Dib waits until Zim is done inspecting his nostrils—indignity upon indignity, but six months in space with this freaky alien have seriously worn down his sense of embarrassment—and sighs. “I don’t get why you’re so upset about this.”

“ZIM IS NOT UPSET.”

“I don’t know, it kind of seems like you are?”

“To you, it seems that way. Because you’re stupid.” Even standing in Dib’s lap, Zim barely has a foot on him, but he’s intimidating regardless. “Tell me, human. Do you want to die?”

“Most of the time, yeah.”

“Well, too bad,” Zim hisses, face so close to Dib’s they’re nearly touching. “You aren’t allowed to die.”

Dib has half a moment to register the look in his eyes: fury, mixed with some undefinable emotion that he’s not used to seeing on Zim’s face. Then the sedative hits, and Dib blacks out.


End file.
